I’ve started putting “cash” in VMMXX (Vanguard’s money market mutual fund). I have an account at Vanguard, so trading it is free. I can’t have that money immediately, but it would only take a couple of days.

I’ve rebalanced a week ago – so far so good, but obviously the point of employing momentum strats like these is to withstand recessions and (thus) beat the benchmark. Having said this, the real test is yet to come 😊

A big glas jar in the kitchen. I guess that’s the bottom end of “various net worths”, but some months I tend to throw in every coin I carry home at the end of the day. That fills up the jarp pretty fast.

Had the opportunity to speak to a Partner from Egerton Capital at a networking event last year and his was of the same view that there will be more arbitrage for them. It’s quite fascinating how markets have inherent mechanisms to self-regulate.

Another issue that he talked about was that these passive funds are black boxes that CEOs cannot communicate with. Usually, there is a healthy dialog between CEOs/CFOs and the investors, which is happening less and less. Some CEOs were in fact very worried because sometimes they would talk to investors prior to significant announcements and gauge their reaction, whereas now this is not possible anymore.

I personally use my Betterment account with a medium risk setting (40% Stock, 60% bonds). They have an “emergency fund” account option which is more like a traditional savings account with 2% interest, seems to be almost identical to the Simple one.

Currently I’m fine with the medium risk Betterment one. I’m young(er), single, and have decent job security so I think the gains outweigh the risks in my case. That being said I have yet to live though a recession with any substantial investments so I could be wrong, and I do try to reevaluate regularly.

Also, I usually move my cash from my income from my checking account to Betterment about once a month, so I have that sitting in my checking account as a kind of “pre-emergency” fund for smaller incidents.

First I was skeptical about the extra overhead of holding also small cap and emerging markets ETFs, given that in backtests, the long term returns when holding only large & mid cap, compared to adding small cap and EM too are very similar. Eventually I decided to just trust the market and replicate it.

The bond part of the portfolio gave me a lot of headaches, because of the instability of the eurozone, deflation and low interest rates.

First I decided to split between US and EU, to hedge the political & default risk in the EU. I understand this gives me more currency risk.

Then between the low yields of the short term bonds, and the increased risk of the long term ones, I decided to go with intermediate term, considering also the duration of my investment, I hope that in the long run, the interest and inflation risk I hold will be compensated by higher total returns.

The Lyxor euro bond was chosen instead of the iShares or db-x equivalent ones, due to higher fund size & liquidity.
Corporate bonds (either individual or via aggregate funds) were not chosen due to the increased risk which is not compensated by higher returns, as far as I saw in the 10 year history charts.

We don’t really have an account dedicated to being our emergency fund. In the past we had a bunch of funds set aside that we used to get some bank signup bonuses, but then stopped bothering with that.

At this point there’s a negligible interest big-bank account that we get paid into and often through negligence and lack of automation, accumulates to more than a reasonable size for an efund, but then we “correct” this by moving it all into the brokerage accounts.

This is all to say, we aren’t really good about maintaining a separate emergency fund at all, much less trying to optimize for rates on it. I wish I could say this was some sort of a principled stance with regards to performance chasing and/or saying that worrying about the interest on the efund is probably not time well spent or whatever, but honestly it’s just laziness and good luck of never having been forced to reckon with the potential bad effects of those choices.

As a relatively young American I’m basically 75% VTI, 25% VXUS (although using Admiral Shares instead of ETFs). If we extend this to the whole household, there’s a really small slice in BND too.

I’m not sure I have a succinct answer for “why?” at this point. I set those targets when I was really young, didn’t leave notes for myself to read later, and haven’t really revisited it since.

If I’m trying to be more complete in this response, probably there is probably some significant “because I’m young enough to never have seen a downturn” going on here, given that it is in effect all in on equities.